Cooking with weed — using pot in cookies, brownies and candy — is an alternative way of getting the active ingredient, THC.

Edible products, though pricey, can be bought at local marijuana dispensaries and enterprising cooks can make their own after doing a little research.

Hank Borunda, owner of The Greener Side dispensary near Stem Beach and The Greener Side West in Pueblo West, isn’t making edibles for his stores at this time. He says he’ll make them at the Pueblo West location once he’s licensed to do so by the county and the state.

He doesn’t make marijuana brownies, cookies or candy at home for his own use, either.

“I’m not a huge edibles fan,” Borunda says.

“Tons of people” do make pot products at home, he says, using recipes off the Internet.

“It’s easy to do. You’re just replacing butter with weed butter.”

Mary Oreskovich of Hopscotch Bakery says she doesn’t make pot-laced goodies because that’s not how she wants to do business, but she jokes, “I’ve thought about it — it sounds like the money is pretty good.”

Asked if it seems easy enough to do, she says, “Oh yeah, I think so. I do know a guy who still has a house here but he’s moved to Castle Rock. He bakes edibles and takes them to concerts. He sets up a little table and sells lots of them. I sell my brownies for $2.75 (each) at the bakery, and he gets $10 or $12 for his.”

Oreskovich says she really doesn’t know much about baking edibles but thinks marijuana butter is used.

“I don’t have anything against it — a friend of mine had cancer and used it for medicinal purposes — but it seems like a whole other ball of wax I don’t care to get into.”

According to online sources, flour for baking pot products also can be made by grinding marijuana as finely as possible and mixing it with all-purpose flour — 1/2 cup of powdered cannabis per 1 cup of flour.

Like other herbs, marijuana also can be used to make tea, though there’s a difference of opinion if tea is a good way to obtain the effects of the THC, which is fat-soluble and not water-soluble.